How Yale's Miye Oni Went From Division 3 College Commit to An NBA Prospect

Yale's Miye Oni didn't have a single Division 1 scholarship offer until the spring of his senior year of high school. Now he's an NBA Draft prospect. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Everything about Miye Oni's basketball journey defies convention.

And it's not just because the 6-foot-6 junior shooting guard from Yale could become the first Ivy League player drafted into the NBA in almost a quarter of a century.

That in and of itself is remarkable, but everything that led to that is also outside the pale of a traditional basketball journey to the NBA.

Oni is currently projected as the No. 47 pick in the NBA Draft by ESPN.com, and that despite the fact that he did not have a single Division I scholarship offer coming out of Viewpoint High School (CA).

"Miye has been moving up our board all season long," ESPN's Jonathan Givony said of Oni, who is averaging 16.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 3.8 assists for the Bulldogs. "I think he's having a really good year and has established himself as a definite NBA prospect. Scouts are scouring the globe for tall, long, athletic wings like him who can pass and shoot and he has real upside to continue to improve."

Oni didn't even make the varsity team at Viewpoint until his junior year, and then he suffered a knee injury and had to wear a brace. He was limited to just a couple of games.

Because of the injury, he didn't have any film to show college coaches entering his senior season.

"I had the measurables and the test scores, but I didn't have any film," he recalled during an interview before a recent game at Monmouth.

Entering his senior season, Oni sent emails to about 50 high-academic Division III schools that he thought were "pretty good at basketball." He included his height, his test scores and his transcript, all in the hopes of getting someone, anyone, to take an interest.

"We reviewed your film and we have people that we're recruiting that are better than you," Oni said one New York City school told him.

No one else was interested, either.

"Most of them said, 'No, we already have people,'" Oni recalled.

Oni even attended Elite Camps at Stanford, Cornell and Penn. He really wanted to attend Cornell because his older sister, Oluwatoniloba, went to school there, "but the coaches never recruited me." Neither did the other schools he visited.

Meantime, Kevin App, who took the head coaching job at Division III Williams College in 2014 after serving as an assistant at West Point, saw Oni’s name and relevant information on a questionnaire in the West Point basketball office. App asked West Point head coach Jimmy Allen what he knew about the kid.

“All I wrote down was, ‘Didn’t play much but man, does he look the part in layup lines,’” Allen told App.

After growing from 5-foot-9 as a freshman to 6-4 as a senior, Oni then committed to Williams in October 2014 without App ever having seen him play live.

"At that point Williams was the only school recruiting me going into my senior year," Oni recalled.

"My parents and I were a little worried. They didn't know if I was going to get any other interest. We didn't want Williams to drop out so we figured we had to basically commit now before I even played a game in high school basketball."

But Division III schools can't offer scholarships and Oni and his family soon decided they needed more financial aid than Williams could offer.

"The tuition for Williams was over $60,000 and they weren't really giving us that much help on it," Oni recalled. "So my family literally could not pay." Oni's parents, Oludotun and Opeyemi, are Nigerian. His father is a Professor at University of Phoenix and also an engineer. (Miye's full name is Olumiye.)

The financial aid people at Williams suggested, somewhat sarcastically Oni thought, that his family consider the Ivy League because those schools are obviously strong academically but can also offer better financial aid packages.

Oni opted to play his senior year and remain committed to Williams while seeing what else might develop. For one game around Christmas of 2014, Yale assistant Matt Kingsley scouted the team in order to watch Christian Juzang, a junior guard who played alongside Oni at Viewoint. Kingsley noticed Oni in the layup line and said, "Who is that kid?"

Kingsley left the game and didn't think much more about the player until Robert Icart, Oni's coach with the BTI AAU program, called him in the spring of 2015 to discuss Oni. Icart sent Kingsley a highlight video and the Yale assistant thought, "Wow, this kid does look pretty good."

After seeing the tape, Yale head coach James Jones offered Oni a scholarship without having seen him play live. Just as App had taken his commitment to Williams without having seen him live.

"It's the first time I ever offered a kid by just watching tape," Jones said. "I watched the tape and I thought he was just really phenomenal on tape. He had a dunk that was ridiculous but what I really liked about him was his court vision, his seeing the floor and his passing the ball. He made threes, he did all the little things, he checked all the boxes. And academically he was more than sound. It was kind of a no-brainer to take a kid like that early."

Kingsley then spoke to Oni's father and got the family to fly to Yale for an unofficial visit in May 2015. Due to complications with the flight in and out of Hartford, the family only spent about an hour-and-a-half on the Yale campus.

In the meantime, Icart notified other Ivy League schools about Oni, and he ended up taking an official visit to Princeton a couple weeks after the Yale visit. Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell were also showing interest at that point.

Still, because Yale's admissions were closed, they couldn't accept Oni for the 2015-16 season. Instead, Kingsley offered to find a prep school for Oni for the following season. They agreed on Suffield Academy, which is about 45 minutes from Yale.

That July entering his post-graduate year, Oni continued to play AAU ball and his stock exploded yet again. He led his BTI team to the championship game of the prestigious Fab 48 in Las Vegas. Along the way, Oni's team beat a Canada Elite team that had Thon Maker and Justin Jackson . He scored 34 points in one game against future pros Terrance Ferguson and Billy Preston before losing to Josh Jackson's 1Nation Elite team in the championship game.

"That really gave me confidence that if these guys are all going to play in the NBA, then why can't I," Oni recalled.

"When I saw him play in the summer after he committed to us, it's the best anybody's every played that I've recruited," Yale's Jones said. "It was one of those things I was happy we got him committed early."

That summer, Oni picked up offers from schools like Alabama, South Carolina and St. Mary's and could potentially have opted to decommit from Yale and go to a bigger basketball school -- on a full ride. St. Mary's would have taken him in the fall of 2015. In fact, some of those schools told him he'd never make the NBA by going the Ivy League route.

"If you're really serious about playing professional basketball, you should go here," Oni said one coach told him of their school.

Still, he remained committed to Yale.

Now Oni seems destined for the NBA, it's just a matter of when. The Spurs, Jazz and Pelicans have been especially interested, Kingsley said, while the Nets have contacted Viewpoint coach J.J. Prince,, according to the paper there.

"It went from the general consensus is he's a prospect to this kid is going to make it," Kingsley said of the feedback he gets from NBA personnel.

Even Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said last month after Duke routed Yale that Oni "will be a first-round pick."

"They have three guys who are going to be among the first 10 guys picked, and he's able to hold his own against those guys and show well," Jones said of Duke's fab freshmen. "So I think that bodes well for him going forward."

If, and when, he's drafted, Oni will become the first Ivy League player drafted since current Boston Celtics assistant Jerome Allen was taken in the second round in 1995.

"If we have a kid that's going to get drafted in the NBA, that means we're going to be pretty good," Jones said. "Obviously, that's Miye's dream and it's something he's worked to do for a great deal of time now, and it would be great for him and his family. But certainly we want to win as much as we can while we have him."

As it turns out, the Ivy League Tournament will be held at Yale come March, meaning if Oni and the Bulldogs can make the top four of the league and then win two games in their home gym, Oni could showcase his skills in the NCAA Tournament. The nation and the NBA will certainly be watching then.